Never mind Tacitus or Gibbons. It is Aesop that US military planners should be studying. In one of Aesops 'Fables', two hyenas are cohabiting. Now, hyenas were believed by the ancient Greeks to change sex each year. So, the male gets randy and starts trying to take the female up the chocolate donut. The female turns round and says: "If you do that, friend, next year the same thing will happen to you."

Same to Uncle Sam.

While you're here, go read Charlotte Street on Foucault, sexuality and other illusions. He should have mentioned Foucault's propensity for fisting, which surely counts as a kind of technology of the body: a transformation, as Zizek has it, of a bodily organ into an organ without a body, a detached Object, ready-to-hand (or fist) etc.